The period of near-zero interest rates is over, and the recent noticeable growth in the debt burden, as well as in the cost of interest payments to service that debt, has made it more challenging for national and global financial regulators to strike a balance between keeping budgetary parameters stable and spurring economic  development.  This  article  proposes  a  “safe”  threshold  for  the  debt  burden  such  that  the  ac-cumulated debt would not diminish prospects for growth and degrade fiscal sustainability. A significant negative linear effect of government debt on GDP growth rates from 1980 to 2021 has been observed for a total sample of 57 countries. According to the Hansen test, there are relatively safe thresholds for high- and middle-income countries at 56% and 24% of GDP, respectively. An assessment of the impact of government debt on the dynamics of interest expense indicates that there is a stable positive relationship between them. The conclusion drawn is that the thresholds beyond which an acceleration in the growth of interest payments would produce an increase in the debt burden stand at 51% and 29% of GDP, respectively, for the same groups of countries. However, the current conditions of unprecedented sanctions that restrict access to foreign borrowing together with a double-digit key interest rate were not taken into account for calculations based on the retrospective data. When those factors are included, the authors’ projections indicate that Russia’s safe level of debt should not exceed 20% of GDP.

The article examines the degree of public trust in the Central Bank of Russia after the transition to inflation targeting. For this purpose, the author analyzes available data from inFOM consumer surveys of confidence in the Bank of Russia as a whole as well as in its inflation targets from 2014 to 2024. Public  confidence  in  the  Bank  of  Russia  remained  relatively  high  from  2014  to  2017  as  inflation targeting was adopted, but the Bank became far less credible to households from 2019 to 2022 because they did not believe the inflation target of 4% was achievable by the end of the current year or over the medium term. This is probably due to their lack of awareness that the Bank’s principal goal is price stability even though they are actually experiencing high inflation. The households surveyed think that government authorities are largely responsible for controlling inflation. Furthermore, consumers do not take notice of the information provided by the Central Bank of Russia. Using news articles from Russian media, posts from news communities on the VKontakte social network, and Google Trends search queries, the author shows that consumers who ignore information about the Bank’s policy are at a serious disadvantage when there is economic uncertainty. The discrepancy between  the  inflation  expectations  of  consumers  and  professional  forecasters  diminishes  as  the volume of information tied to the phrase “Bank of Russia” increases in media, social network posts, and online searches.

The paper assesses the risks incurred through self-employment and platform work in Russia, which arise because the basic mechanisms for mandatory social insurance are lacking for these workers. As part of their research methodology, the authors used expert assessments based on extensive interviews with the management of large digital platforms and with representatives of trade unions, government authorities, and insurance companies. The authors also relied on the profiles regarding the forms of employment under study using data generated by the Federal Tax Service, the Federal Statistical  Service,  and  a  telephone  survey  of  research  staff  of  the  Russian  Academy  of  National Economy and Public Administration and CEOs of a number of large digital platforms. The authors assess the risks involved in self-employment and platform work as they relate to the characteristics of  the  employed  and  to  commercial  risks,  including  those  encountered  by  insurance  companies that issue policies to self-employed and platform workers. A separate assessment was carried out for exposure to risks from implementing various policy scenarios: 1) bringing self-employed and platform  workers  into  the  compulsory  social  insurance  system;  2)  restricting  them  to  non-state social insurance; or 3) requiring platforms to provide social guarantees to their employees or act as social insurance agents for their workers. The authors conclude that it is impractical to provide self-employed and platform workers with the same kind of social security that formally hired labor enjoys.  A  fundamentally  new  approach  to  providing  social  guarantees  to  the  self-employed  and platform workers would be necessary to minimize their social risks, and any such approach would have to address the risks and challenges identified in this study.

ESG rating is an important indicator of a company’s social responsibility, which is taken into account by investors and regulators. However, if the ESG rating is calculated incorrectly, investors and regulators will make erroneous decisions and companies will be given improper guidance about how to modify their operations. Currently, there is a serious methodological problem in that ESG ratings from various rating agencies can be significantly different for the same company. Two of the most urgent questions in current ESG research are why these differences come about and how critical the  divergence  of  ratings  is.  First,  the  article  reviews  international  research  on  rating  divergence and summarizes the findings. A similar analysis is then performed to compare the methodologies and rating results of three leading Russian ESG rating providers — RSPP, RAEX, and NRC — for 2020-2021. The results indicate that Russian rating agencies are somewhat more divergent in their assessments of companies than international ones (Krippendorff’s alpha for Russian ratings is 0.4, but for non-Russian ratings it is 0.55), and Russian agencies’ coverage of ESG components is less comprehensive than that of the other rating agencies (although coverage in the RAEX methodology is close to the average of the international equivalents). The article also analyzes the distribution of companies across different gradations of the ratings by the three Russian agencies and attributes the distinctions that emerge to the way the ratings are calculated and the general ideology of the agency. Comparison of average ratings for different industries by different agencies indicates that these ratings are also rather inconsistent.

The  article  presents  the  main  conclusions  from  an  investigation  of  the  ways  in  which  factors  involved  in  digitalization  stimulate  the  processes  required  for  digital  transformation.  Despite  the central  place  that  digitalization  occupies  in  modern  economic  research,  neither  the  factors  that contribute  to  digitalization  nor  how  they  affect  the  dynamics  of  digital  transformation  have  been sufficiently  elucidated.  Such  an  examination  would  apply  neoclassical  growth  theory  (production functions)  to  identify  the  factors  in  digitalization  in  order  to  highlight  how  capital  and  innovation are the main driving forces behind digital processes. The article carries out a correlation analysis using  the  pair  correlation  method  on  officially  published  statistical  data  from  127  countries.  The results fall into four phases of digital development and enable an assessment of the varying impact of digitalization factors on the digital transformation process in accordance with these phases. The resulting analysis indicates that capital is less important for digitalization than innovation, while the impact of both those factors decreases as digital development progresses. On the assumption that digitalization is currently slowing down among the leaders in digital advancement, Russia (like many countries that have the necessary potential) has an opportunity to improve the relative standing of its digital economy. In order to achieve that goal, this research would suggest increasing the country’s network readiness and developing human capital while also harnessing innovation as the main driver of digital transformation. This research topic is relevant to evaluating and enhancing Russia’s prospects for socio-economic development.